Gov. Rick Scott Wants to Rank Every Florida School First to Last

January 13, 2012 | 12:02 PM

A new Fortune magazine profile says that Gov. Rick Scott wants to rank every Florida school.

Fortune magazine is out with a new profile of Gov. Rick Scott this week that discusses what he’s learned in his first year in office.

The profile hits all the standards marks — Photo of state seal-emblazoned cowboy boots? Check. — but also includes this intriguing detail:

I’m sitting in the governor’s Tallahassee office as Scott quizzes his education chief on a plan to rank the state’s 3,800 schools, first to last. The concept of imposing new metrics is pure Scott and dates, he is explaining, to his Columbia/HCA days, when he would rank, say, emergency rooms, to distill what separated the best from the worst. “Really, if you think about some of this stuff, it’s pretty simplistic,” he says. It’s also exactly the kind of thing that rankles state employees and constituents (“shareholders,” in Scott parlance).